The death penalty is too strong a sentence when serious questions exist re the truthfulness of police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and even forensic scientists.

The death penalty for heinous crimes is something I have strenuously argued for in the past. But no more. Not after the Central Park Jogger
case. That was the one that tipped it for me, and the discovery of so
many other “clearly guilty” parties that turned out to be innocent of
very serious charges. More about that later. It used to really bother
me that parole boards could “undo justice”, in my opinion, and turn a
multiple-convicted felonious sociopath loose on the public, based on
“good behavior” or how nice he talked to the board, or how he “cleaned
up his act” and was now rehabilitated. And then, once loose, he would
commit another similar crime, and the process would begin all over
again. And again.

Here’s what the Church teaches about the use of
potentially lethal force in defense of life, and about the legitimate
civil authority to make use of the death penalty.

CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCHSECOND EDITION

PART THREE: LIFE IN CHRIST

SECTION TWO: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

CHAPTER TWO: "YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF"

ARTICLE 5: THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT

You shall not kill.54

You have heard that it was said to the men of old, "You shall not
kill: and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment." But I say to you
that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to
judgment.55

2258 "Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the
creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special
relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the
Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any
circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent
human being."56

I. RESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE

The witness of sacred history

2259 In the account of Abel's murder by his brother Cain,57
Scripture reveals the presence of anger and envy in man, consequences
of original sin, from the beginning of human history. Man has become the
enemy of his fellow man. God declares the wickedness of this
fratricide: "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is
crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground,
which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your
hand."58

2260 The covenant between God and mankind is interwoven with
reminders of God's gift of human life and man's murderous violence:

For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning. . . . Whoever
sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man
in his own image.59

The Old Testament always considered blood a sacred sign of life.60 This teaching remains necessary for all time.

2261 Scripture specifies the prohibition contained in the fifth commandment: "Do not slay the innocent and the righteous."61
The deliberate murder of an innocent person is gravely contrary to the
dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of
the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each
and everyone, always and everywhere.

2262 In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord recalls the commandment, "You shall not kill,"62
and adds to it the proscription of anger, hatred, and vengeance. Going
further, Christ asks his disciples to turn the other cheek, to love
their enemies.63 He did not defend himself and told Peter to leave his sword in its sheath.64

Legitimate defense

2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an
exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that
constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a
double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of
the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not."65

2264 Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality.
Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to
life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is
forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be
unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will
be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the
act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one
is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another's.66

2265 Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for
one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the
common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to
cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also
have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil
community entrusted to their responsibility.

2266 The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful
to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to
the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public
authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to
the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing
the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted
by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then,
in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety,
has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the
correction of the guilty party.67

2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility
have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does
not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible
way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect
people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such
means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the
common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state
has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has
committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking
away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which
the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare,
if not practically nonexistent."68

Even after reading Evangelim Vitae, and even after listening to John
Paul the Great discussing this topic, I still felt that he did not fully
understand the situation in America. Yes, it is possible to
lock a serial killer away forever and keep him away from future victims,
including those in prison with him. However, we all have seen how
often that is simply not done here. In America, there is such a thing
as a three or even more time offender for such serious crimes as
kidnapping, rape, torture, murder, even first degree murder. I
seriously doubt that that situation exists anywhere else to the degree
that it exists here in America. We seem to have gone way too far in looking after the convicted criminal’s rights. I’m not denying that they have rights, but stating that there are limits to everyone’s rights, and no convicted murder should be granted more rights than those he denied his victim(s).

But then, the Central Park Jogger case happened. You may
remember it; a lone woman was jogging in Central Park, New York City,
and she was brutally attacked, beaten half to death, raped and left for
dead. She was beaten so severely that her skull was broken, and she
very nearly died. In fact, for some time, it was fully expected that
she would die. It appeared that her assailant had fully intended
that she die. By some miraculous intervention, she was eventually able
to make a near full recovery, with health and well being restored, but
not her memory of the event. Maybe it’s better that she doesn’t
remember that.

Five black boys were arrested in short order for the
offense, and they were tried for it. I readily admit that I had some
very dark thoughts about them, and mercy was not among them. They all confessed to the crime.
They were all convicted. If I had been on that jury, I would have
fought hard for the death penalty for all of those boys. If I had been
the judge, I would have had difficulty asking God to have mercy on their
souls. The crime was so heinous as to be enraging. This was a crime
that cried out to Heaven for vengeance.

But, they just went to prison, as is usual, it always
seemed to me. Some years later, another common criminal confessed to
the crime, saying that he had acted alone. And then, the whole case
began to unravel, and to reveal a justice system of corruption and lies,
and, over a period of time, with other similar cases coming to light,
it turned me completely around on the issue. Those five black boys didn’t do it.

The first thing revealed was that the newest confessor
to the crime submitted a DNA sample, and it matched the DNA found on the
victim. Huh? There was DNA evidence found? And it didn’t match
any of the five boys? And the court knew it? Why didn’t I know that?
Why didn’t the public know it? Why didn’t the jury know it? Did the Judge know it?

Most important of all, why did these five young men confess to something they didn’t even do?
They had all confessed. They wrote out and signed confessions. Can
we ever depend on a signed confession in a court of law again? What
came to light is that cops have ways of tricking people into
confessions, particularly young people. Not only that, but defense
attorneys will often recommend to their innocent client that they
should sign a confession as part of a plea bargain. Hey, man, I know
you didn’t do it, but they’ve got so much evidence against you that a
confession is your best shot at a lighter sentence; it’s the best you
can do under the circumstances, so take what you can get while you can
get it.

It turned out that the five black boys were among a
larger group who were doing something they all periodically did, which
was called “wilding,” in which they mobbed-up and assaulted people,
particularly white people, just to beat them up for being white. It
might be a sort of poetic justice that they got the crap scared out of
them and spent some time behind bars over this, but, the bottom line is,
they never even laid eyes on the lady who was nearly killed. That’s what they were tried, convicted and sentenced for. And they didn’t even do it.

Evidence was withheld. Confessions were falsely
obtained. In all probability, these five kids were probably the only
ones of the “wilders” that the cops could catch, and they just stuck
them with the rap for something completely unrelated.

My faith in the New York police is about gone. My faith
in the whole justice system as applied in New York City is about gone. I
wonder about it elsewhere in America. With the advances in DNA
technology, periodically we see these cases where people, some on death
row somewhere, are granted freedom because the DNA now proves that
someone else did the crime they were convicted of. Not just a few times. For awhile, it was nearly a daily event. In some cases, even eye witness testimony was refuted by the new DNA evidence.

There was even one case in recent memory of a forensic
scientist faking DNA test results to convict suspects that some police
friends were “certain” was guilty. You can’t even trust the pathologists or the laboratories involved.

Can any part of the investigative process, let alone the
litigation, be trusted any more? If a cop can “plant” evidence at a
crime scene – anything from a gun to some item with the suspect’s finger
prints on it – then a cop can even plant DNA evidence at a crime scene,
or tamper with it later. If a cop or a DA can trick someone into a
confession, and if a defense attorney can convince an innocent man that a
confession is in his own best interest, then what the hell happened to
the search for truth? All my life I’ve heard the old saw that says that
every single person in prison claims that he is innocent of what he was
convicted of.

Could it be true?

I’m sorry, but, “beyond a reasonable doubt” is no
longer good enough for me in any capital offense. I would have to know
with absolute certainty that the accused was guilty, or I could not vote
for conviction so long as the possibility of a death penalty was
present. There could not be the slightest shadow of a doubt before I
could vote guilty.

Pray for the restoration of honor and integrity in America.

Pray for truth and justice.

=====

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Changes pursuant to changing the website URL
and name from
Thinking Catholic Strategic
Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option
June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages. .

Regards,

Vic

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"Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is the sin committed by the person who claims to have a 'right' to persist in evil-in any sin at all-and who thus rejects redemption." Pope Saint John Paul the GreatDOMINUM ET VIVIFICANTEM

"Not to oppose error is to approve it; and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and, indeed, to neglect to confound evil men-when we can do it-is no less a sin than to encourage them." Pope St. Felix III

If a purposeful violator of the Constitution who is a sworn officer of the governemt is not a domestic enemy of America and a traitor, then
there is no such thing, and the Constitution itself is without meaning,
and America has lost its grounding and its very purpose for being. Anti-American-Court

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The Heresy of Chrislam. Those claiming that the “Allah” of Islam’s Qu’ran and Yahweh or God of both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are one and the same are missing one glaring point: GOD NEVER CONTRADICTS HIMSELF.

Never be lukewarm.Life itself demands passion.He who is indifferent to God has already forfeited his soul.He who is indifferent to politics has already forfeited his liberty.In America, religion is not mere window dressing and citizenship is not a spectator sport.Do not allow our common destiny as a whole people to just happen without your input. Seek the Truth; find the Way; live the Life; please God, and live forever.

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"We belong to the Church militant; and She is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass Her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator’s supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights.”--Pope Pius XII

"It is not lawful to take the things of others to give to the poor. It is a sin worthy of punishment, not an act deserving a reward, to give away what belongs to others."--St. Francis of Assisi

Atheist Genesis:

In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing.
And then nothing accidentally exploded and created everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally encountered other bits of everything and formed some new kinds of everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into self-replicating bits of everything.
And then some self-replicating bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into dinosaurs.
See?

“ … for I have sworn upon
the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind
of man.” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in
the year of our Lord 1800. The context
involved resistance to any form of Christianity or Deism legally imposing
itself throughout the USA. We must wonder what he might say
about our current government's forced imposition of strict secularism – i.e.,
anti-theism – throughout the USA. I submit that legally enforced secularism of society, like theocracy, like Marxism,
and like Islam, is, precisely, a form of tyranny over the mind of man.Nothing good can come from the religious cleansing of Judaeo-Christian society. Government imposed secularism is just another form of theocracy.